Various products, such as digital cameras and digital video cameras, are used to capture images and video. These products contain an image sensing device, such as a charge coupled device (CCD), to capture light energy focussed on the image sensing device. The captured light energy, which is indicative of a scene, is then processed to form a digital image. Various formats are used to represent such digital images, or videos. Formats used to represent video include JPEG, JPEG-LS, JPEG2000, lossless JPEG2000, H.264, MPEG2 or MPEG4.
Motion JPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4 and H.264 are compression formats. Such compression formats offer high quality and improve the number of video frames/images that can be stored on a given media. However, a user of the JPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4 and H.264 compression formats has to make a number of irreversible decisions at the time of capturing image and video data. For instance, the user has to decide on brightness, colour scheme, resolution and image quality.
One format known as the RAW format ameliorates some of the disadvantages of the above compression formats by storing sensor raw data. As such, one red, green, or blue pixel value is stored for each pixel location of an image. The RAW file format allows the user to make decisions as to brightness, colour scheme, resolution and image quality at a post processing stage. To allow more video frames/images to be stored, the RAW format often compresses the sensor raw data, using lossless compression such as JPEG LS.
All of the formats described above require a much more complex encoder than corresponding decoder. A complex encoder requires complex encoding hardware. Complex encoding hardware is disadvantageous in terms of design cost, manufacturing cost and physical size of the encoding hardware. Complex encoding hardware also results in long encoding runtime, which in turn delays rate at which video frames can be captured while not overflowing a temporary buffer. Additionally, more complex encoding hardware has higher battery consumption. As battery life is essential for mobile devices, it is desirable that battery consumption of such mobile devices is minimized.
In recent times, some cameras often enable more user-flexibility during post to processing. For example, some cameras allow a user to decide on an image plane after an image/video frame is captured. Such new cameras capture image data and convert the image data, using sophisticated decoding, into a viewable image or video. Cameras which offer this extra user flexibility include cameras with coded apertures, plenoptic cameras, phase plate cameras, stereo cameras, multi-view systems, radial catadioptric imaging devices, lensless cameras, cameras including mirror arrays, random cameras and event based cameras.